Development of the ACP safeguards neutron counter for PWR spent fuel rods

Abstract

An advanced neutron multiplicity counter has been developed for measuring spent fuel in the Advanced spent fuel Conditioning Process (ACP) at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). The counter uses passive neutron multiplicity counting to measure the 244Cm content in spent fuel. The input to the ACP process is spent fuel from pressurized water reactors (PWRs), and the high intensity of the gamma-ray exposure from spent fuel requires a careful design of the counter to measure the neutrons without gamma-ray interference. The nuclear safeguards for the ACP facility requires the measurement of the spent fuel input to the process and the Cm/Pu ratio for the plutonium mass accounting. This paper describes the first neutron counter that has been used to measure the neutron multiplicity distribution from spent fuel rods. Using multiple samples of PWR spent fuel rod-cuts, the singles (S), doubles (D), and triples (T) rates of the neutron distribution for the 244Cm nuclide were measured and calibration curves were produced. MCNPX code simulations were also performed to obtain the three counting rates and to compare them with the measurement results. The neutron source term was evaluated by using the ORIGEN-ARP code. The results showed systematic difference of 21–24% in the calibration graphs between the measured and simulation results. A possible source of the difference is that the burnup codes have a 244Cm uncertainty greater than ±15% and it would be systematic for all of the calibration samples. The S/D and D/T ratios are almost constant with an increment of the 244Cm mass, and this indicates that the bias is in the 244Cm neutron source calculation using the ORIGEN-ARP source code. The graphs of S/D and D/T ratios show excellent agreement between measurement and MCNPX simulation results.